Art Did the Darndest Things . . . to Your Jokes

The voice of the editor wondered if, instead of the column I would have handed in this time, I might want to do a short, quick appreciation of Art Linkletter. My only reluctance in accepting the mission is that what I have to offer may not be everyone’s idea of an appreciation.

I wrote for Linkletter for a week for the same reason that I wrote for a lot of famous people for a week or two only. My boss-to-be, Johnny Carson, was canny enough not to replace my then-former boss Jack Paar immediately upon Jack’s exit from “The Tonight Show” in 1962. There may have also been a contract obligation elsewhere that kept him from doing so. Even if so, the wise thing for Carson was not to appear to jump into Jack’s chair while people were still lamenting his loss.

My guess is that the gap between the two stars was bigger than most anyone remembers. Following Jack came a kind of summer stock season for “Tonight.” Entertainers of all kinds, shapes and degrees of talent hosted the show. I recall Robert Cummings, Donald O’Connor, Mort Sahl, Merv Griffin (a newcomer), possibly a Gabor, Steve & Eydie, Jack E. Leonard, Jack Carter, Sam Levenson (smashing), Jerry Lewis and two memorable weeks of Groucho.

For some reason, and partly because Jack had established it, each felt the need to do The Monologue.

The results were mixed.

Linkletter was a man of great accomplishment and performing skill, a shrewd, shrewd businessman. His was a great American success story, complete with humble beginning. He provided the world, especially with those kids, with a million healthy laughs. Among his list of performing gifts, monology was absent.

David F. Smith/Associated PressArt Linkletter hosted the popular TV shows “People Are Funny” and “House Party” in the 1950s and 1960s.

The “Tonight Show” writing staff included, besides me, veteran writers for Bob Hope, Jack Paar and other biggies. We had a bad week of it.

The great David Lloyd would drop on Linkletter’s desk his usual gems, only to have them rejected. “And, invariably, if he picks one, he picks one of my feebs,” Dave would lament. (“Feeb”: Lloydese for a weak joke, thrown in, admittedly, to fill the page a bit.)

One night at dinner at Dave’s house in Beverly Hills, years later when his resume had gone on from Art Linkletter to “Mary Tyler Moore” (including his Emmy-winning “Chuckles Bites the Dust” episode), “Frasier,” “Cheers,” “Taxi” and more, he reduced the table to hysterics by recalling a specific example of what he called “how to Linkletterize a joke.” So that no living being of whatever dimness could be left behind in getting it.

Ready? All you youngies need to know is that there was once a popular comic named Jack E. Leonard, a man physically rotund enough to be appropriately, and affectionately, called “Fat Jack.”

Here is the one line Art selected from that day’s Dave Lloyd submissions: “On tonight’s show we’re going to talk about comedy teams. You know, comedy teams like Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis, Jack E. Leonard . . . .”

That’s how Dave wrote it.

Here’ what Art — democratically assuring that no one hearing it should be left in the dark — did to it. All emphases are his:

The audience reaction? If someone had dropped a pin, it would have been deafening.

That did it. Rather than for us to go on strike for the remaining days of that week, I suggested a plan. I went downstairs in the RCA building to the bookstore, bought a Bennett Cerf joke book, and we each copied jokes out and handed them in. None of us could bear to find out what fates they met.

Someone, I guarantee, will react to this with the pre-recorded, “How can you speak disrespectfully of the dead?” Truth is, I have always found it remarkably easy. Why anyone, by dying, should thereby be declared beyond criticism, innocent of wrongdoing, suddenly filled with virtue and above reproach escapes me. And the minor crime of smothering jokes hardly puts Art Linkletter in the pantheon of history’s malefactors.

He was a pleasant and cordial man to be around, and inspiringly professional.

I don’t know how well he knew his Shakespeare, but he paid three times the grievous penalty expressed in Old Montague’s “O, thou untaught! What manners is in this? To press before thy father to a grave.”

It happened to Art Linkletter with three of his five children. A price even an envious Greek god might consider too high to exact for such success.

What's Next

The host of “The Dick Cavett Show” — which aired on ABC from 1968 to 1975 and on public television from 1977 to 1982 — Dick Cavett is the author, most recently, of “Talk Show: Confrontations, Pointed Commentary, and Off-Screen Secrets.” The co-author of “Cavett” (1974) and “Eye on Cavett” (1983), he has also appeared on Broadway in “Otherwise Engaged,” “Into the Woods” and as narrator in “The Rocky Horror Show,” and has made guest appearances in movies and on TV shows including “Forrest Gump” and “The Simpsons.” Mr. Cavett lives in New York City and Montauk, N.Y.